Week 11 – Social Bookmarking

Hi, all! We've now moved into the 2nd half of our 21 things exploration. I hope that you've been enjoying our journey so far...

Bookmarks, or Favorite lists, have come a long way since the early days of the Internet. One of the more interesting tools to help manage them is http://delicious.com – the most common site for "Social Bookmarking". Delicious manages three primary, and useful, activities – and all three can be used in conjunction, or individually.

The one that I started using allows you to save your bookmarks to an online location, so that you can use them on any Internet connected machine [and you probably won’t be doing a lot of browsing if you’re not connected to the Internet!]. To do this, all you have to do is go to: http://delicious.com and create an account. When you do that, one of the options you’ll have is to upload your local bookmark file to delicious. Then, when you’re logged in, you can use them, add to them, and etc. If you keep it updated, you can always have access to your bookmark file wherever you might be. I find this to be useful, and particularly if there are reference type sites that you want to have access to, but can’t always remember.

A second use of http://delicious.com is the ability to discover new sites and share them with others, or see what others have shared. One example: let’s say that you’re interested in modern art – you can do a search of popular bookmarks within Delicious that have been marked as being about modern art – that means that the most popular bookmarks in everyone’s collections will show up at the top. They won’t always be what you’re looking for, but it’s a great way to discover new sites that relate to your interests.

The third major use of Delicious is in sharing. I haven’t done any of this yet, but as we work through this week, we might find that it’s an interesting exercise. Briefly, you can choose to share your bookmark sets with other Delicious users, and they can share their sets with you. In library terms, it means that we could put together a delicious site that is a collection of our best and most useful Library related or Reference sites.

So, for this week, head on over to http://delicious.com if you haven’t tried it already, and create an account. Upload your own bookmarks, or choose to start from scratch. Add a few, delete a few, organize a few and give them tags if you’d like. In general, just look around and see if this would be a tool that is useful for you, or even for the Library.

Explore the Tags, and look into the popular section, to see if there are things in your areas of interest that you’ve been missing. One of the other things you can take a shot at is to go to the popular bookmarks section, and then choose to look at a randomly bookmarks site from the popular list. By selecting “Jump to a Random Bookmark” – but beware… not everything will be academic in nature…

Once you’ve spent a little time with http://delicious.com write a blog post in your own bogs about what you’ve found, what you liked [or didn’t] and if you think that this might have some work application.

See what you can discover!

jjs

Week 10 – just for fun

Hi All,
After thinking about the fact that it’s a short week, I thought that it would make more sense to find simple online toys – a pair of things that may be useful, but that are also uncomplicated and interesting. After looking around, and spending rather a lot of time trying to find things that amused me as well as seemed to have some utility, I settled on two:
The first is: http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/
I get a lot of questions about finding things [outside of work, of course] and many of them are fairly simple – Let Me Google That For You seems to be a useful tool to cover some of those things. The idea behind LMGTFY that you can build a complicated search in google [or a simple one], and simply send someone the link created on the site. It then reruns the search within their browser, like:
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cardinals+playoff+%22north+central%22+site%3Ad3football.com
I’ve no idea how long this site will be around, as I can’t imagine that Google is delighted by it. You might find it interesting, though – and perhaps helpful around the holidays.

The second thing is something that I find sort of fascinating – perhaps you will, too, or perhaps you’ll decide that I’m vaguely mad – Wordle creates java-based, on the fly "word clouds". If you haven’t seen one of these, they’re quite interesting.
You can paste in some text [or the link to a blog feed] and the application will parse the words in it, finding the most common ones. Those are then displayed in varying sizes, with the most common words in the document or site being the largest. There are a lot of layout options, from font choices to colorways, adjustments for language, general layout and number of words to display. Some of the things that are returned are very nearly word art -
Please note, however, if you save it to the online gallery, they’ll be visible to anyone who uses the Wordle site. While I don’t think there are any copyright implications…

Here are some of the more interesting ones I built:
Text copied from a series of our web pages:



The Fall ’08 Ex Libris


The recently updated Library Disaster Plan [Thanks Belinda!]

and last, though surely not least: The entire 2nd book of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Andros to Austria…

http://www.wordle.net/create

The biggest trick with Wordle is that you have to copy the image and paste it... though printing is also possible.

Have fun with these - if you have alternatives, by all means post them, and we'll give them a try!

jjs

Week 9, Part 2 - Fun with Language redux

I hope that everyone has been discovering new fun phrases to use [or that may make you cringe, depending]. We've got a good number of comments to the initial posting, so it's about time to post the translations or expansions of the acronyms for those who decided not to search all of them out -

Let's see if we were right about the familiar ones, and learn some new ones!
jjs

Week 9 – fun with language

Netspeak: chat and text messaging has caused a sub-genre of language to emerge and this week we’ll take a look at some of the commonly used abbreviations and acronyms that we might come across as we’re working in an online environment. Of course, some of what we’ll find will also be a bit amusing, I hope.

As with most specialized languages, netspeak is created to show an insider status, but also to allow communications to occur in shorthand, and to save time. On the Internet, and particularly within chat, these kinds of terms allow for a simpler and faster level of communication [as long as you can make sense of what the term means]. Text messaging took this a few steps further, because texts are limited to a specific number of characters.

Netspeak
The most common one, which we probably all know, is LOL – though it would almost always be more accurate to type LIH. Don’t know LIH*? JGI*!

Text shorthand
tst msgs Rnt alw ez 2 figa ot, bt f u try, n f uv sum lvl of imagntn, ur ahed of d gme.

or:
Test messages are not always easy to figure out, but if you try, and if you have some level of imagination, you are ahead of the game.

For this week, let’s do a little research, and see how things go. Try to find between 5 and 10 examples of netspeak that amuse you, and a couple example of text message language, if possible.

Post the examples you find without translation, as a comment on this post – blog comments are something new, too, but easy to do – and include at least your name, so we know who has posted what we’re looking at! After a few days, we can start giving the translations to the harder ones. Have fun with this one!

[n.b. some of the more common ones can be relatively crude – so make your own decision about those!]
jjs

next week: Bookmarks!

*
[LIH - Laughing In Head]
[JGI - Just Google It]

Week 8, Part 2 – Gtalk

GTalk is one of my favorite internet tools, and I hope that you’ll also find it useful. There are a number of different ways to access GTalk, and part of the decision depends on what you’re going to use it for. For our work-based purposes, we’re going to want to download and install the GTalk desktop application, which you can get from: http://www.google.com/talk/
Either follow the download GTalk instructions on that page, or let me know, and I’ll come and help out. You can use your existing Gmail or Blogger userid and password to access GTalk. GTalk can also be run in a browser window [for when you can’t or don’t want to install the application]. This option can also be started from the http://www.google.com/talk/ page by choosing Launch Google Talk Gadget [help is also available from here]. This pops up a window that looks quite like the application and has most of the benefits of it. You can also run the Talk application from within Gmail [too many options?] it starts automatically when you log into your gmail account, and is on the left hand side of the page.


Here is what I’d like to do, to get everyone up and running with this, and to gain some experience with the program. The best solution is to download the application itself, since it’s the easiest one to use, and offers the most flexibility. Once you’ve done that, log in and look at the program itself. If you’ve used an Instant Messaging application already, it’ll look pretty familiar to you.


What I’d like to do is to have each of us log into GTalk for at least the rest of November, and let’s find reasons to use the program, to get comfortable with it. To make that happen, I’ll shortly send a piece of email with my Gtalk userid in it to everyone. Once you’re up and running, add yours to the list, and we’ll all add them. Once that’s done, as long as you’re logged in, we’ll all ‘see you’ and be able to chat.

There are a lot of interesting options that we can talk about once we’re all going, so if you’re a GTalk user, or explore and find interesting things, post them here are comments!


It’s easy, quiet simple and can be fun – so let’s see how it works for us.


One of the most important things to try and get accustomed to is to mark yourself as ‘away’ when you leave your desk – this takes a bit of practice. There is a little down arrow next to the default ‘available’ icon, just click on that, and you’ll see the options.


So, let’s try this out, and see how it works for us! If you're having trouble, let me know!


jjs

Week 8 – Time to Chat, part 1

Well, we’ve made it to week 8, having been through a lot of different tools and ideas so far, so here is another weekly post. Chat programs have been around for years now, and there are different tools and different interfaces that we can choose from. The one that we’re going to work with is, not surprisingly GTalk from Google. I chose this one for two primary reasons. First, we all have Google addresses from the Blogger/Gmail trials we have already done. Second, and probably more important, we’re probably going to be moving the Chat Reference service over to GTalk in the near future, so if we’re going to take a look at one of these tools, and spend some time getting used to it, it’s probably the best solution.

There are two primary uses for a chat program in our Library. One of them is for external communication, like the Chat Reference that we’re already doing. The main benefit of GTalk in this area is that we can create a direct chat function on the web page that doesn’t require the student to have to download software or even a Google account in order to chat with us. That’s a project that we’ve been looking into.

The other primary use is for internal communications. I’ve been in libraries where everyone was logged into a chat program for most of the day, just marking themselves away when they left their desk, or turning the program off when they needed to really concentrate on something without any interruption. While we already have a lot of possible tools for internal communication, from phones to email to walking, chat is another possible tool, and so we’ll take a shot to see how useful it might be for us. If you think of it as a sort of email lite, you may get an idea of how it might be useful.

If all else fails, it will give us a chance to practice with the idea of using a tool to chat, among ourselves, and will also allow us to prepare for using GTalk as a tool to talk to the outside world. That does bring up one of the downfalls of chat-based program use in a work setting, though, and that probably should be mentioned here. It’s pretty easy to find yourself in a situation where chat extends beyond the work place, and begins to consume more time than any of us would want. I hope that we can avoid that particular issue, but we do have to be aware of it.

More follows on Friday, about how we’ll want to proceed with this test, and the different ways that we can move forward with the Week 8 trials!
jjs

Week 7 – myEBSCO and alerts, RSS feeds, etc.

Is it really week 7 already?
That seems impossible!

Last week, we looked at MyEBSCO, and this week, we’ll take it one step further. Within the customization settings, there are a few interesting things that you can do to automate your searching. If you have a favorite author, perhaps, and would like to be automatically reminded whenever something by or about them shows up in an EBSCO database, you can create an RSS feed that automatically shows up in either Google Reader or Bloglines [remember those? Week 3.] You can also use this process to create an automatic piece of email as a reminder, too.
To do this relatively simple operation, perform a search in a EBSCO database that actually retrieves results. I did a simple keyword search for: Ondaatje, Michael

Once the results come up, look for Search History/Alerts, immediately below the search fields. Click on that to expand it and you’ll get a series of options. The options will vary depending on the search you performed. In my case, I was given a choice of a straight keyword search, a SU or subject search or an AU or author search. I’m going to choose the straight keyword search [mostly because the last name is odd enough it’s not going to give me a bunch of false positives…]
To actually create a link for my search, I’m going to choose the little orange icon [which is the standard icon for an RSS feed]. When I do that, a window pops up giving me some options. I can enable an email alert by choosing “Edit Alert” and adjust the settings there, if I wish. Since I am a regular user of Google Reader, though, I prefer to incorporate my EBSCO feeds into that platform. To do this, all I have to do is to copy the “Syndication Feed” link by right clicking on it and choosing “copy link location”. Then I can go to Google Reader and paste it in as a new feed. Alternatively, you can just click on the “Syndication Feed” link, and it’ll take you to a page that gives you directions on how to do this simply.

Once you get a feel for this, you can begin to be pretty creative with it. If you have a favorite magazine or journal that is in EBSCO, you can set up an alert that let’s you know whenever a new issue has been published – you can set up an alert that gives you tables of contents [for many publications], and all sorts of other ideas. Want to get really creative? Set up a search that looks for recipes containing an unusual ingredient and every time one is indexed in an EBSCO title… you get the idea, right?

So, this week, give this a try, and see what you think about it. If you choose your alerts carefully, they’ll be very interesting. If you build them too broadly, you’ll get 50 chocolate cake recipes every day [which may, or may not, be a bad thing…]

Use your blog to give us an idea of how this process went for you, and if you find it to be interesting or useful. Did you decide on an email alert, or an RSS feed? Also, if you come up with a creative use for this, by all means let us know about it!

Next Week – It’s time to Chat.
Happy Halloween,

jjs

Week 6 - MyEBSCOhost

Hi all,
And welcome to Week 6 – Today, we’ll begin a two part look at one of our primary tools, the EBSCO databases. Academic Search Premier is our largest and most diversified database, and is the default starting point for nearly everything we do, the database automatically selected from the library home page, so it’s a good idea to take a look at it. I know that we’re all familiar with the basics of EBSCO, so thought we’d take a look at some of the more hidden things.

In our first part, let’s look at customization. There is an interesting tool called My EBSCOhost that allows for some interesting alternatives. My EBSCOhost allows a valid user to create a personal log in, which offers some interesting possibilities. First, once you’ve created a login of your own, using the top ribbon and choosing the link “Sign in to My EBSCOhost” it will ask you to log in, or to create your own account… do that now, please, we’ll wait……………………………………

OK, welcome back. Once you’ve created your account and logged into it, you’ll see, right under the search boxes, the word preferences. This allows you to make some changes that persist over time, so they don’t have to be adjusted every time. Things like automatically putting in your email address, changing the citation type, APA, MLA, etc. and adjusting the results per page. It also allows you to set up an automatic export to EndNote, a citation management tool available on campus, which we’ll talk about later.

These are pretty simple changes, but they’re a beginning for the more interesting parts. Once you’re logged in, if you add articles or citations to your own folder, they stay in the folder over multiple sessions. That means that you can easily add things to come back to later. Students particularly like this feature, as it means that they can print when it’s convenient, or add to research when time allows.

It also means that a faculty member or students working in groups can create a folder that can be shared [as long as they share the email address + password]. That makes group work and class readings a lot easier to manage, but you have to know it’s there!
For this week, let’s get individual accounts set up, and write a quick blog entry about the differences in the preferences, and if there are any interesting things you observe, or ideas that you have about how we could use this.

Also, if you liked the concept map in Credo Reference, take a minute or two to look at the Visual Search interface in Ebsco – it’s quite different, but does offer some interesting ways to look at your results, and some interesting ways to limit them.

Next Week - My EBSCOhost part two, the cool stuff: automatic searches and RSS feeds

trivia time: what does EBSCO stand for?

Week 5 – The E-Book

Hi all,
and welcome to Week 5. This week, we’re going to try a library specific activity, and we’ll take a quick look at two collections of electronic books. While I’ll admit that few people like eBooks per se - they’re not particularly comfortable to read, nor can they be transported very easily [unless you’re using a laptop] they do have some interesting advantages. The major advantage is that they are immediately accessible, from wherever the student happens to be. That makes them particularly useful as a last minute sort of tool. Additionally, they’re easily searchable – not just the bibliographic information, but the entire text of the eBook. They also have some interesting features, one of which we’ll look at a bit later.

For this week, what I hope you’ll all do is take a look at a NetLibrary eBook that interests you, record the bibliographic information on your blog, and talk a bit about how useful you think it might be for our users. Also, take a peek at the Concept map in Credo Reference, and give us some indication about whether you think that would be useful.

Oesterle eBooks are available from: http://library.noctrl.edu/books/ - netLibrary is the larger collection of eBooks, and contains the full text of a large portion of the Project Gutenberg free e-text collection as well. Searching is easy, and most subjects are covered, though our collection is limited.

Credo Reference is a collection of 100 reference titles, dictionaries, subject encyclopedias and etc. Take a look around, but by all means, make sure that you give the Concept Map a try. If nothing else, it can serve as a good overview of a subject area, and can give you some additional ideas for search terms. If nothing else, the Concept Map is a fun piece of technology to play with, and make sure that you use the slider for the Link Levels, to add more nodes to the map. I think you may find it to be fun.
We have a few other collections of eBooks as well, and they’re all located on that same page. If you’re interested, give those a quick look, too.
jjs

My Gmail experience –

I’ve been using Gmail from very nearly the beginning, and have gotten so used to it, that I don’t always think about why I like it, and why it works so well for me. Part of it has to do with a level of comfort with the interface and tools, of course, but I think there is more to it than that. One of the things that I really like is the way Gmail files email as conversations, as opposed to a bunch of discrete pieces of email. With my daughters, I have email conversations that range up to about 50 pieces of email, and they’re all automatically kept filed together.
One other thing I like very much is that the search facility is a standard Google search within the email itself. Since I don’t even have to think about the process of formulating a search, it’s easier to find what I’m looking for, and there is no time spent building indexes or opening another search interface, it’s just all right there. The last strength is that my mobile connects directly and happily to Gmail, so that I have fairly constant access to my email account. Not a vital selling point, but a nice one.

jjs

Week 4 – Adventures in eMail

Welcome to week 4 – I do hope that you’ve all been enjoying the process as we’ve been moving through it. If you have any recommendations for additional things, by the way, feel free to email me, and we’ll see. They may already be on the list, but if they’re not…

This week, we’re going to take a look at a different kind of email – Gmail from Google.
I suspect that some of you are already Gmail users, while others may not have tried it out. For my part, I’ve been using it for so long that every other email tool seems a bit antiquated. As you take a look at it, you’ll note a lot of differences from Novell’s GroupWise, or other email accounts you may have used in the past.
If you’re new to Gmail, blog about some of the things that you like, or the things that you don’t like. If you’ve been using Gmail for a while, tell us why, and let us know if you like it?
If you’ve been using blogger for your blog, you already have a Gmail account – just go to
https://mail.google.com
and log in with the same userID and Password. If you want to create a new account, you can go to the above address, and look for the phrase: Sign Up for Gmail! 

You can also find out a bit more about the features of Gmail at: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html

A good blog to subscribe to might also be: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/ - Google’s own blog about changes and updates in Gmail. They often release enhancements and this is where they annouce them. 

Have fun, and share your thoughts!

Next Week: an actual Library-specific  topic, eBooks!

jjs

The Elevator -

All, 

After a meeting with Maintenance yesterday, I wanted everyone to be aware that the elevator passed a usability inspection last month. They are going to order a new motor, so that it will quiet down again, but for the moment, it is safe to use. 

Jan is going to change the signs, and we'll go back to the old way of using the elevator, primarily for staff and accessibility issues. If you see or hear the elevator being used, keep an eye on it. 

Thanks, 

jjs

Week 3, part 2

Week 3 is drawing to a close, and I hope that it's been interesting, so far. 

The section on blogs is nearing the end, and tomorrow we'll move on to something a little different, but let's keep up with the blog posting through the remaining weeks. 

I hope that everyone has 'chosen' a blog reader, be it the Google Reader or Bloglines [does anyone use something different?] and that you've got all the 21 Things blogs set up in it, as that will be one of the primary ways that we'll all keep track of what's going on with the following weeks. We can, and should, be using comments on each others blogs as well, just to remain in contact as we go through this. 

jjs

Welcome to Week 3 of "21 Things"

We’ve looked at a lot of blogs, shared some of our favorites and created our own. This week, we’re going to look at a pair of tools that ‘aggregate’ blogs themselves. While it’s possible to bookmark individual blogs and check on them now and again, what an aggregator or ‘blog reader’ does is to keep track of the blogs that you want to follow, and when you log into your aggregator account, it only shows you blog postings that have been updated since your last login, which saves a lot of time, and allows you to go through them more quickly and more conveniently, without having to look at every individual blog only to find out that many haven’t been updated.
This week, we’ll take a look at a pair of tools that perform this function. They’re rather similar. Google Reader is one of the tools, and if you created a blogger or Google account to build your blog, you’re more than half way there. http://www.google.com/reader/
Another tool you might want to consider is Bloglines – www.bloglines.com To use this tool, you’ll need to create a free account at Bloglines, and that’s a simple and straightforward process.
Both of these tools function in much the same way, it’s a matter of style and which interface you prefer. For my part, I’ve been using Bloglines for a few years, and am simply more used to the interface. I’ve been working with Google Reader since beginning the 21 Things process, and am moving toward using that, though I am not fully migrated.
Take a look at these tools, and pick one. You’ll find that it’s easier to follow blogs this way, and both of them will offer many suggestions – Bloglines has a “Top 100” while Google Reader offers “Feed Bundles” that pull together recommended blogs in broad categories.
Once you’ve chosen your aggregator, you can add blogs to it easily, either by adding a blog URL manually, like: http://tcalodols.blogspot.com/ or by choosing to use a “subscribe to” link [look on this page, and you’ll find it near the top, on the right hand side].
You’ll also find that it is easy create folders in both tools, so that you can organize your blog feeds, making it easier to read them in a sequence that might make a bit more sense to you.
Also, I’ve been adding our blogs to the “My Blog List”, located at the bottom of the 21 Things blog itself. You can copy and paste those URLs into you own reader – you’ll find it a lot easier than looking at the bottom of the 21 Things blog, since it will only give you the updated posting.
This week, what we’re also going to learn a little bit about commenting on Blogs – a simple and straightforward process. Once you’ve chosen an aggregator to use, leave a comment under this posting, telling us which one you chose, and perhaps, why!
jjs

Week Three

Week 3 of 21 Things is coming soon!
You may have noticed that I've been trying out different templates - I think that I've settled on a new one. What do you think?

jjs

Week 2, Thing 2!

Well, week 1 was quite the success, and I think we managed to learn all sorts of things about blogs, finding them and reading them. I hope that everyone had a chance to discover some new things, and that you may have found something that you considered to be useful – or just interesting.

This week, we’re going to create our own blogs – Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask all of you blog about your jobs, or put deep thoughts on the impact of technology on the student population on the web for everyone to see [though if you wish to do so…]

The tool used to run this particular blog is called blogger. I’m going to suggest that you all create an account here [and there are many alternatives] for two primary reasons. The first is that there are settings in blogger that will allow you to keep your blog private if you wish. 21 Things @ Oesterle is run in this fashion, as it’s intended to be an internal process, and you may wish to have yours set up the same way – or you may not care if it’s out there for the world to read.
The second reason – if we’re all using the same software to blog, we can help each other, and that’s a marvelous thing, too. That said, if you already know another piece of blogging software, feel free to use that!

Here is a video that explains how to create a blogger account.


If you already have a google account for Gmail or some other service, you can log in and use that. If you don’t have one, or if you prefer to keep them separate, these instructions tell you how to create a new account.
There is another useful video that show you how to use the privacy features of blogger, so that you can turn off searching for your blog and etc.


This weeks assignment is simple and straightforward – Create a blog, put up your first post – which can be anything - a simple test message will suffice – and send the URL [like http://tcalodols.blogspot.com/] to everyone else in the library, so we can see what you’ve done, and follow along.

You’ll also discover, if you look around the blogger interface a bit, that there are different template for how your blog will look, and many other things that you can use to have a bit of fun with it. Experiment and enjoy yourself!
The main purpose of your new blog will be to talk about the weekly things as we go though the 21 weeks – of course, you can feel free to add other things if you like!
jjs

a blog overview via video!

This is a video created by CommonCraft, the entity mentioned by Steve during his talk on Monday - I have to say that I found it to be really interesting...

jjs

Welcome to 21 Things!

I'm delighted that you've found your way here, and hope that this whole project turns into a good learning experience - but also hope that we can have fun while doing it!

jjs

Week 1
Blogs, short for web logs, can take a lot of different forms. Some function as online diaries, others as stream of consciousness writings, and still others as a way of sharing interests with readers, evaluating the news, etc. You’re reading one now! There are blogs written on nearly every topic you can imagine, and many of them will link to others on the same general topic, as you’ll discover.
One way to discover blogs on topics that are of interest to you is to use: http://www.google.com/blogsearch/advanced_blog_search?hl=en though there are many alternatives, and you’ll quickly discover that blogs tend to link to other blogs…
For the first of our 21 Things, find two blogs – one having to do with your work, the other having to do with something you’re interested in, a hobby or activity. Browse the options that you find, until you come across a pair that you like, and might like to follow for a while. Once you’ve settled on your choices, share them with everyone via email, along with a brief description of what they cover. If you’re already a blog reader, try to find a pair of new blogs!

[Next Week: Creating your own blog!]

Test posting

This is the first post, and as such, has little in the way of content!